View full sizeAlternatives for the future of Des Moines, Iowa, where Sasaki & Associates led a scenario planning process, included vastly different amounts of suburban housing, as indicated by the color orange. The firm may come up with similar types of maps for the NEOSCC planning effort for Northeast Ohio.Sasaki & Associates

Flying blind never makes sense, but that’s how Northeast Ohio has managed growth and development for decades.

In this part of the country, as in most of the United States, regional planning is weak, if not nonexistent. Nobody has had the big picture — or the power to do much about it.

Decisions over land use and zoning, which determine where development happens and ultimately what communities look like, are made at the municipal level. They’re also molded by the region’s four federally authorized Metropolitan Planning Organizations, whose job is to coordinate how federal dollars are spent on transportation. Around here, that has meant mainly roads and highways.

The unintended result has been a steady, 40-year expansion that has oozed outward from the region’s interstates, sapping its cities, hobbling the economy and dividing rich from poor and blacks from whites, even as the overall population has fallen.

Northeast Ohio now has its best shot in decades to come up with a better vision for a more sustainable future that could also shrink the cost of government. It’s essential not to blow this very rare chance.

ÂFunded by $4.25 million in grant money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and more than $2.3 million in local grants and in-kind contributions, and led by veteran planner Hunter Morrison, the consortium has entered the third and final year of its critically important project.

So far, though, the group has relatively little to show for the time and money, which is symptomatic of the overall problem the region faces.

The Akron-based nonprofit organization, whose members include representatives from the 12 Northeast Ohio counties in its planning area plus city governments, universities, nonprofit groups and foundations, has spent two years getting organized, reviewing prior studies, conducting public dialogues and getting ready to make recommendations about the future.

Progress has been slow. The consortium has found it hard to generate trust and a sense of common purpose among newer communities on the fringe and older ones in the urban cores.

The organization has delayed tough conversations about potential solutions to the region’s problems, such as improving mass transit, concentrating development where it already exists, and even considering — gasp! — growth boundaries. Meetings have focused largely on process, not substance.

Now comes the hardest part, and with just a year to go before the HUD grant ends, time is running out.

Fortunately, in December, the group’s 33-member board voted to spend $1.3 million, its largest single outlay, to hire a team of consultants to explore contrasting scenarios for the future. The goal is to create maps and analyses of the fiscal impact of continued sprawl vs. other options across the region.

The team is led by Sasaki Associates Inc. of Watertown, Mass., the landscape architecture and planning firm that led the urban design of the highly acclaimed, $200 million Euclid Avenue bus rapid transit HealthLine completed in Cleveland in 2008.

Other members include City Architecture of Cleveland and Fregonese and Associates of Portland, Ore., which specializes in analysis of local government spending.

Also on board is Nelson Nygaard of San Francisco, the traffic-engineering firm that recently recommended closing one of the two cross streets in Cleveland’s Public Square to make the space greener and more beautiful. Â

ÂThe first job for the consultants is to show what the region would look like by 2040 if current trends continue.

Those trends are clear. Between 1970 and 2010, the 12 counties of Northeast Ohio fell 7 percent in population, from 4.1 million to 3.8 million people.

Despite the shrinkage, the latest data from the consortium show that the region actually added 250 square miles of additional suburban development between 1979 and 2006 — a 21 percent expansion. This has led to higher local taxes, environmental problems, racial segregation, higher commuting costs and dependence on the automobile as the primary mode of transportation.

“Our costs of government and infrastructure are rising at many multiples of our economic growth,” Brad Whitehead, a consortium board member and president of the Fund for Our Economic Future, said at the group’s monthly meeting in April. “We are literally drowning ourselves in concrete.”

The official posture of the nearly 400 local governments in the region is to welcome more development in each community as if growth will be endless. The aggregate effect of all those myopic local plans is that even though the region is losing population, it is zoned to accommodate another 12 million to 14 million residents, according to the consortium, primarily in costly, low-density development outside the urban centers. Â

ÂAside from showing what happens if we continue down this road, the Sasaki team needs to come up with alternatives that might persuade outlying communities to preserve open land. The consultants also need to clarify the true and complete cost of development to localities and the entire region, so that communities can make smarter choices going forward.

It’s essential to remember, however, that NEOSCC is not part of a communist plot to crush individual liberty and forcibly resettle people where they don’t want to live. It’s not a new layer of government, and it can’t impose its vision on the region.

It’s a voluntary organization of local governments that applied for funding under the Obama administration’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The same program has funded similar regional planning efforts in Houston, of all places — the city that hates zoning — and other communities such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; Kansas City, Mo.; Salt Lake City; Minneapolis; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Anyone who wants to lower the cost of government ought to support the process in Northeast Ohio, because the impulse behind it is fundamentally conservative. It is to boost opportunity by lowering the region’s overhead and making smarter and more cost-effective decisions about how we use land.

In Northeast Ohio, power over land use and zoning will remain local prerogatives, which raises the question of whether the NEOSCC recommendations will have any clout beyond the organization’s three-year funding from HUD. Â

ÂHere, there’s reason for fresh hope.

Grace Gallucci, 47, a former Chicago transit official and a Cleveland native, became the new director of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency in May. Founded in 1968 at the behest of the federal government, it coordinates spending of national transportation dollars in the region comprising Cuyahoga, Lake, Lorain, Geauga and Medina counties.

Under Howard Maier, Gallucci’s predecessor at NOACA, the agency earned a reputation for passivity. It acquiesced to political pressure that allowed sprawl to continue. To be fair, NOACA on Maier’s watch also was the lead applicant for the big HUD grant that financed the sustainability consortium.

Soon after her arrival at NOACA, Gallucci also took over as chairman of the consortium, which gives her additional clout.

She said in a recent interview that she’ll push hard for an excellent outcome from the Sasaki team and that she wants NOACA to play a far more active leadership role in determining how spending on transportation affects all of Northeast Ohio than it has in the past.

That’s key, because development follows government investments in transportation, an inherently political process. There is no such thing as a pure market operating apart from government actions that determine the value of land and set the course for the future.

Gallucci’s fresh viewpoint and energy are encouraging. But time is running out for NEOSCC, and a great deal of money has been spent. The consortium is planning meetings for public input and refinement of a vision, but, very soon, it will be time for the region to see results in the form of crystal-clear options for the future.